I recently installed the social booking marking content management system called Pligg, I quickly found myself disliking the color scheme of the default theme which is called Wistie. The layout of this template I did like, so rather than building a complete new design from start to finished I opted to modify the original styling to something I did like. I must say that I have to give the Pligg team a round of applause I have designed templates for many platforms such as Wordpress, Joomla etc and Pligg happens to be one of the easiest platforms I worked on.

Most web designers will tell you the hardest part of learning new content managements is you need to learn how the elements of the page tie in all together and that means learning how the files are hooked together. Pligg and the original template designer have made this a walk in the park and changing this theme only took a couple of hours.

The Name and Color Scheme

I decided to name this pligg template Clean Sam, it is short for “Clean Small and Minimalistic” which describes this design pretty well. The color scheme I used is from a popular online gaming database site, I won’t say which and let you guys guess using the comments below.

Screenshots

I don’t have an online demo site as of yet but something I will add when I get time, in the meantime you can check out this template by clicking the screenshots below.

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Template Installation

Install this pligg template is extremely easy, please choose one of the methods below.

Method 1 (Fastest)

• Login to your web hosting control panel such as Cpanel or Plesk.
• Using your web hosts file manager upload the package to /templates/
• Once the file is uploaded unachieved it using the file manager.
• Login to your Pligg administrator panel.
• Click Configure.
• Click Template on the Left Side.
• Double Click the Template Value and Enter cleansam as it's value

Method 2 (Easiest)

• Unzip package somewhere on your local hard drive.
• Using FTP upload the folder cleansam to /templates/
• Login to your Pligg administrator panel.
• Click Configure menu.
• Click Template on the Left Side.
• Double Click the Template Value and change it's value to cleansam.

Changing Pligg Site Name

It took me a while to figure out how to change the site name so I decided to include on this page for those installing Pligg for the very first time. Simply login via your administrator account and then click language, it is the first changeable value on the page which reads PLIGG_Visual_Name, double click the value and then type your site name in – This will put the name of your site in both the header and footer, the header mention will be a clickable link and useful for people returning home as well as boosting your branding keywords for SEO purposes. Below you can find a screenshot should you get lost in translation.

Changing the Default Avatar

Pligg comes with a default avatar which is saved in gif format which doesn’t work well with Clean Sam since the image in the gif file has a white edge which sticks out like a sore thumb. While I haven’t included a avatar with this template finding one is pretty straight forward. Simply navigate to Google and search for images that are 15x15 for the smaller avatar, and 30x30 for the bigger avatar in PNG format (Transparent), if you are presented with little choice then a more popular size is 32x32 and 64x64 which you can resize using any popular imaging editing software. It’ worth mentioning that some of these images found using the Google image finder may be copyrighted, so if you are concerned about licensing you should search for free icons, avatars included within the search.

To install new avatars for default use simply login to the Pligg administrator control panel and click configure and then Avatars, and enter the path of the image where you should of uploaded it to your server ready for us. Below you can find a screen capture on what you should be looking for within the administrator panel.

Backlinks and Footprint Paranoia

You may be aware that major search engines are going to insane depths to slap sites that have bad backlink neighbors, ByBe is a well trusted site with lots of authority however you will not find a single backlink in this release or any later releases of this template. Web designers should learn that including branding or targeting anchor text links can actually have negative effects on your site as seen by many already.

Many webmasters believe that Google checks for uniqueness of content as well as the template design its running on, it is a myth by paranoid seo’ers that Google checks the style sheet location, for example say we have this template installed in /templates/cleansam/ then the footprint of the style sheet would be /templates/cleansam/css/style.css and this could be found on 1000’s of sites assuming people like this template, while as said above this is pure myth and people really don’t know all the factors that Google checks on uniqueness it is one factor you can easily change. To rename this template simply login to the administrator panel within Pligg before hand and login to your server using FTP, simply rename the folder to whatever you like and then tell Pligg the new path which you should know by reading the install instructions on this page.

Download Clean Sam

To download simply click here: cleansam-v0.01.zip

Version and Change log

Version 0.01 - first release to public

To Do List

Responsive: Make template responsive for mobile phones and smaller tablets.

Licensing

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

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